Friday, July 14, 2017

Analysis. Chinese Navy close to owning the Pacific.

Why do we continue to go with the fiction that the Type 55 is a destroyer? It's obviously a cruiser and we should treat it as such!

via Shepard Media.

China is producing naval vessels at a rate that will soon see the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) eclipse the US Navy (USN) in force structure and capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region. Sources indicate that China is intent on replacing the US as security guarantor for the region, and could use its position to force regional neighbours to serve as tributary states.

China’s naval modernisation efforts are based entirely on modelling their navy after the US naval combatant structure, said Chris Cavas, a Washington-based naval analyst. They are emulating the USN’s ‘balanced fleet concept’, he said, with destroyers, frigates, logistics, support mission craft and, now, aircraft carriers.

China is mass-producing new classes of fighting vessels nonstop, such as the Type 052D destroyer, Type 054A frigate and Type 056A corvette. ‘They are cranking those babies out,’ Cavas said.

They have also begun building four cruisers, the Type 055, of 10,000t displacement. The Type 055 is capable of air defence, anti-cruise missile, anti-submarine and anti-ship missions. ‘China’s navy is becoming a force to reckon with,’ he said.

The Type 055 has a vertical launch system capable of firing 120 YJ-18 land attack/anti-ship cruise missiles and this is a ‘problem for the US Navy,’ Cavas said. ‘It is not clear whether our countermeasures for Chinese anti-ship missiles work.’

China’s navy is also constructing its first flat-top amphibious assault ship, the 40,000t Type 075 (also referred to as the Type 081) with a complement of 30 helicopters.

China’s shipbuilding philosophy is consistent with the ideological dialectics theory known as change in quantity to change in quality, said Ching Chang, a research fellow of the Taipei-based Society for Strategic Studies, and a former Taiwan naval officer.

‘By accumulating evolutionary efforts to a yield point, then a revolutionary new type will be produced,’ Chang said. ‘There is a cyclic pattern in Chinese naval shipbuilding activities: revolutionary-evolutionary-revolutionary-evolutionary.’ This is the general modus operandi of Chinese mainland naval shipbuilding, he pointed out.